Hoping for the Best Opponents Possible
I know some progressives who are cheering Sarah Palin on in the view that if the right nominates the most terrible and wingnutty possible leaders, it’ll be easier for progressives to win. And somewhat along those lines, Spencer Ackerman watches the virus of neoconservatism seeking to use Palin as its next host and remarks:
A segment of conservatism still loves Palin, even though it appears that Palin cost McCain support from independents who didn’t think her prepared to take over the presidency. Whether conservatives will embrace Palin when they have policy-heavy and deeply-religious young alternatives like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal remains to be seen, obviously. But Palin needs a policy platform if she wants to run for president, and the neoconservatives desperately need a political force they can ride back into power. But look: to quote Napoleon, never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
I think this style of thinking is misguided. Election outcomes are largely determined by the fundamentals, and there’s a large element of chance and uncertainty associated with the whole thing. The best way to become president is to (a) win a major party nomination and (b) hope for luck. In other words, anyone who secures a major party nomination has a decent shot of winning. And over the long haul, the tendency is for power to alternate between the parties. And under the circumstances, one wants both parties to nominate the best possible people. For example, any Republican would have won in 1988. We are fairly lucky, as a country, that we got George H.W. Bush who managed foreign affairs competently and on domestic issues proved willing to reach pragmatic compromises with progressive legislators on some fronts. If instead of Bush we’d gotten someone with more of a Newt Gingrich attitude, the whole situation could have been much, much worse. He could have, like his son, really trashed the country.
Meanwhile, legislatively almost nothing of consequence ever passes on a straight party-line vote even in the current era of heightened partisan alignment. Advancing progressive policy requires some members of the less-progressive party to be open to some elements of the progressive agenda. Indeed, in many ways building that kind of support is the most important part of driving policy.
69 Responses to “Hoping for the Best Opponents Possible”
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November 6th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Kind of a buzzkill, no?
Anyway, following that logic, the best winger I could hope for is Bobby Jindal, who seems at least to be quite wonkish and accomplished. Even if he does perform freelance exorcisims. Ahem.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Two counterpoints (although in truth I would prefer Palin to fade to obscurity as soon as possible):
(1) In an election the “fundamentals” make close, the quality of your opponent may be able to make a difference, a fact that Bush II arguably capitalized on twice. So, strategically you would have to balance winning a few more close elections against having poorer leaders when you lost. Of course, the ideal is to have your opposing party nominate people who are not great politicians but who might be relatively decent leaders in the event they win–which in fact is one part of the explanation of why I would prefer a Romney to a Palin in 2012;
(2) The effect you are talking about is most relevant over the long run, and it is an open question what will lead to the Republicans nominating the better people over the long run. It really depends on how they process this last loss, and if they are not yet of a mind to nominate what I would call “serious” candidates, then you might want them to be truly humiliated in the next cycle in order to move them more quickly into a better path in the long run. In other words, you might prefer a Palin in 2012 to a Huckabee, because Huckabee might keep it closer and thus delay progress toward the Republicans nominating serious candidates again.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Jindal’s exoricisms seem to be the stuff that dreams are made of.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
1. Jindal
2. Huckabee
3. The farting preacher from Youtube
4. ???
5. Palin
November 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
If you are going to claim that any Republican would have won in 1988 you are going to have to come up with some kind of explanation of the gyrations in the polling that year.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
It isn’t just the chance of the right wing fringe winning. If the Republican party is represented by moderate people, views to the right of them become radical rather than mainstream.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Well, I disagree with the premise that it’s “all about the fundamentals,” or that the Presidency is a crap shoot. Mondale wasn’t a great candidate who happened to get unlucky in 1984, he was a terrible candidate. As were Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. I don’t see why 1988 was impossible for Democrats anymore than 2000 was impossible for Republicans. Nor do I see that the Republican loss in 1992 was inevitable — Bush had been a hugely popular war-winning president just a year earlier.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Yeah, I agree with Doug but would go further – the Duke was trashing GHW in the polls for quite sometime before Willie Horton came along.
As Walter says, you’re out of your element on this one.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
In other words, you might prefer a Palin in 2012 to a Huckabee, because Huckabee might keep it closer and thus delay progress toward the Republicans nominating serious candidates again.
When I read that, my first response was “fuck you, DTM, Huckabee’s way more ’serious’ than Romney,” and I was going to fire off an angry post to that effect…then I took a breath, and realized didn’t have to start a flamewar over what is essentially which factor of modern conservatism you find more repellent (personally, I hate unfettered capitalism, so I kinda like Huck, while those more scared of the theocrats I think cross fingers for a Romney win).
Of course, neither DTM nor I has anything invested in either of these candidates, so we’re not gonna start a fight over this. But the other side does, and they will, and if their reaction is as visceral as mine was, this is going to be a very, very entertaining four years.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Jeebus, Matt, you are on a roll today. This post is ludicrous.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
MY is already laying the seeds for romney….
November 6th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
The solution to the problem of “extreme” or “bad” party nominees is to change the voting system. I would prefer non-partisan primaries where the top four candidates advance, and where both the primary and the general use a rank-choice instant-runoff voting (IRV) system.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
It would really be better for the country if we had a sane Republican Party, even though that might be contrary to our short-term electoral interests.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I know that this is a storyline that MY is very committed to, but I think it is flawed in several ways. First of all, if this was really true, looking back through history, we should see very few presidential blowouts. What could possibly be worse than an incredibly unpopular incumbent party slogging through an unpopular war and facing the worst economic meltdown in almost a century? Instead, many elections in the last 50 years were far bigger blowouts than this one. That tells me pretty clearly that the conduct of political parties has a pretty big impact on their short term electoral chances.
On the other hand, the system is build to accommodate a balanced two party structure. 200 years of history suggests that this result is fairly robust. Eventually, a minority party will return to its senses and do the things that will allow it to peal off enough moderate voters to become competitive at the national level. But in the short term of 4 to 8 years, it is quite possible for a party to go in the wrong direction and alienate huge swaths of the population. Furthermore, some nominees and election campaigns can be disastrous in and of themselves. When this happens, there are two possible results. 1) A return to sanity of the minority party and a quick return to balance. 2) The emergence of a new party.
If the Republican party decides to go in the Palin direction, I think they will sabotage their chances to win a presidential election in anything but the most absurdly favorable of circumstances.
Remember, MY, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t maintain that the demographics of this country are trending center-left but that Republicans still stand a decent chance of putting a hard right whack-job in the White House without making some substantial concessions as to the power of a few political elites. But you need to make this argument explicitly if you want to stake out this position.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
The best way to become president is to (a) win a major party nomination and (b) hope for luck.
Um. Really? Luck is the best way of becoming president?
Fatalists of the world unite I guess.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
scythia,
Indeed. And for what it is worth, I didn’t intend to imply I would prefer Romney as President over Huckabee (I went back and forth on that issue back during the Republican primaries–I think Romney is a little more reality-based and subject to political pressure, but Huckabee does seem to be a better person). Rather, I was just using Romney in the first example because I think he is really a crappy politician and would likely prove a walkover in 2012 barring a truly catastrophic climate for the Democrats, and Huckabee in the second example because I think he is a pretty sharp politician.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
You know how people used to say that the Republican party is an elitist organization where they give the nomination to the next person in line. Interesting how wrong that is right now. It hard to even identify what the powers that be would choose. In fact if anything it seems like the elites are merely hoping to get a right-wing crowd pleaser who they can control, like Palin. So if Bill Kristol taught college he would be the guy to tell Palin that she’s not cut out for the university. But as a part of the conservative elite he sees her as a dream candidate.
“Election outcomes are largely determined by the fundamentals, and there’s a large element of chance and uncertainty associated with the whole thing.”
I’m a political scientist so I like the fact that at least some people in the media have this view rather than dumb explanations for McCain’s loss that involve matching the Lehman Brothers collapse or the Katie Couric interview to McCain’s drop in the polls. Large scale, longer-term facts about how the country’s doing matter more than gaffes and personality stuff.
That said, there is probably more candidate-related effects than many political scientists claim. It’s just that they’re hard to operationalize so they can’t be put into a theory very easily. Partisan ID and the economy are important, as is incumbency advantage. But Mark Warner didn’t win by 30 points based on the economy alone (the Partisan ID in VA actually favored his opponent). Red states have Democratic senators, and vice versa. Why can’t anyone overcome Susan Collins’ incumbency advantage in a deep blue state in very poor conditions for Republicans? And why did Kay Hagan kick Liddy Dole’s butt? Because the candidate still matters.
Sarah Palin is a horrible candidate and a bad representative of conservatism. She only serves to drive it deeper into the wilderness. I agree that I want to keep her as far away from the White House as possible, so I’m hoping for a much better unelectable Republican like Romney (I just saw that DTM already said that). But they’re both still about as unelectable as you can get.
Scott de B.: “Nor do I see that the Republican loss in 1992 was inevitable — Bush had been a hugely popular war-winning president just a year earlier.”
And the economy stunk in 1992. For whatever reason, the election was about the economy and Bush really paid for it.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
What rea said. It all depends on whether you are optimizing for (a) performance of the Democratic party in elections or (b) good outcomes for the United States of America.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The solution to the problem of “extreme” or “bad” party nominees is to change the voting system. I would prefer non-partisan primaries where the top four candidates advance, and where both the primary and the general use a rank-choice instant-runoff voting (IRV) system.
That would be awesome. Of course we’d probably have Hillary on her way to the White House right now, but no system is perfect.
There would also be pretty severe electoral college complications.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Meh, the phrase “over the long haul” is doing a lot of work there. The Democratic Party held onto the White House for only one term when it was their turn in 1976, but for five terms starting with the 1932 election. It’s entirely reasonable for a liberal to think that Palin as an opponent would result in Democrats being in power longer than otherwise, which might also help a more sane wing of her party come to power.
Of course, neither DTM nor I has anything invested in either of these candidates, so we’re not gonna start a fight over this.
Heh, so us liberals have no reason to fight about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting question. But does Huckabee truly have much support from the base? I know his economic policies are unacceptably left-wing for a lot of Christians. Genuine former preacher or not, nobody better touch their taxes.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’m with DTM – Romney is the perfect opponent in 2012.
1. He’ll probably lose because he comes across as phony and out of touch.
2. If he somehow wins, he probably wouldn’t be a terrible President because (1) he’s not an idealogue who will push a very extreme social conservative agenda and (2) he seems to be a pretty smart guy who will look at data when making decisions.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
There will always be conservatives. There will not always be times of hyper-partisanship. If the Republicans appoint the non-wingnut talent on their side, then it’s time to start disagreeing constructively. That’s to say, there’s a climate that brings forth malicious idiots like Tom DeLay, and it’d be nice to get past that, even if that means it improves the prospects for Republicans in the future.
(You see Boehner responding to the Emanuel pick for CoS with the usual kneejerk wingnut tone, and it’s that kneejerkery which has reduced the party to a rump.)
November 6th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I think the takeaway from all this is that we should always focus on our own candidates and not really worry about who the other side is going to throw up there. Not in terms of scouting the opposition mind you, but in terms of *hoping* Candidate X gets picked because we think Candidate X will be super easy to beat. I’m sure South Bend Central was salivating at the thought of playing those undersized hicks from Milan, but you have to remember: if a team is good enough to get to the championship, they’re probably good enough to win the championship.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
You’re going to have to rethink that, or at least express what you really mean better.
Why not
a) get into politics at some level with a major party
b) hope for luck to at some point win the nomination
c) hope for more luck to win the presidency
And if it is the fundamentals that determine the election, then the nominee for the fundamentally doomed party does not have a decent chance to win the nomination.
This fundamentals vs. campaigning skill argument just cannot be resolved. There haven’t been enough elections to confidently make a claim in either direction. We can take the couple of dozen data points we have and fit them to a line post-hoc but then we’ve used all of our data. We can’t then test it because we don’t have another America to find out how accurate our resulting predictions are. Scientifically speaking, we’re just guessing.
I’ll say it was definitely possible for a Black candidate to lose the presidency in the United States in 2008, running for a major party. If Obama had nominated the democratic equivalent of Palin (and please, I’m certainly not saying Hillary is that.) he would have lost worse than McCain.
But I can’t prove that either. Statements about the inevitability of elections just aren’t worth making. They cannot be proven or disproven.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
If the Senate refuses to seat Alaska’s Senator Stephens do you think she will appoint herself Senator to replace him?
November 6th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
On that note, Obama should drop the proscription of foreign birth from presidential eligibility so Ahhhhnold can run.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
“For example, any Republican would have won in 1988.”
????? 1988 is one of only two elections since 1948 where the eight year rule didn’t apply, and the loser led the polls for long streetches of the general election, which is unusual.
In 1980 you could point to the bad economy, another structural factor. But it’s been established that a good economy doesn’t benefit the incumbent party the way a bad economy hurts it.
1988 then appears to be the clearest example of an election where the campaign determined the outcome. No election in US history would have been a worse example.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Mondale wasn’t a great candidate who happened to get unlucky in 1984, he was a terrible candidate. As were Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
Every one of those candidates were considered to have a better chance of winning 16 months before their election than Ronald Reagan in mid-1979. Ronald Reagan won because of his personality and how badly things were going. Whatever Republican had the capacity to generate enthusiasm was going to beat Carter. If Lowell Weicker had been the Republican darling that year, he’d have been president.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
“There haven’t been enough elections to confidently make a claim in either direction.
Not true. You see the same patterns in most other countries, and regional and local elections in the US and most countries, though usually less clearly as in US presidential elections.
There’s some room for debate over how important different factors are, but I don’t think it’s defensible to claim that the candidates and campaigns are the most important factor.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
However, occasionally parties chose clearly unelectable candidates like Goldwater. The 2008 model Palin would be one of them. Maybe she can learn to feign being knowledgeable better, but I doubt it, and she’s probably ruined her brand forever.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I don’t think ‘88 fits your thesis at all. Open seat races are typically closer than races involving an incumbent and even in relatively good economic times, the out-of-power party typically has a slight advantage after 8 years out of power.
Mario Cuomo or an affair-less Gary Hart could very well have won. Hell, even Dukakis could have won given his polling had he run a better campaign.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Palin is an example of why we should have a Prime Minister/Parliamentary system. Can you imagine being one of the people teaching her to parrot the party line?
November 6th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I think there’s a lot less chance of the wingnut stranglehold on the Republican Party being broken than there is of the remaining Republican moderates bolting the party, having a few beers with Lieberman and the Blue Dogs, and starting a moderate party (or taking over an existing party and turning it into a moderate party).
If that happens, the Republican Party is finished. Even if the Democrats stumbled into a disaster, the moderates, not the Crazy White Christian Party (which is what would be left), would be tapped to pick up the pieces, and vice versa. And a new generation would grow up in a political spectrum defined by two serious contenders: a liberal party and a moderate party.
That’s the scenario I’m hoping for: not a slightly repackaged Republican Party across the aisle, but a new moderate party.
Accordingly, I suggest that any moderate or libertarian who stays in the Republican Party be labeled “Dumber than Rats”… because rats *get off* a sinking ship.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Reagan was considered to be a less intelligent, less experienced but more charismatic version of Goldwater. He went from punchline to saint in four years.
Goldwater was unelectable in 1964 because all Republicans were unelectable in 1964. He was unelectable afterwards because he had been nationally humiliated in an election. Had he been younger and never run before, he could have beaten Carter in 1980.
Anyone who can win a major party nomination can win the general election. Some obviously require more extreme circumstances than others, but circumstances can become extreme.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
That’s the best argument I’ve heard yet.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
1) I think it is FAR more important to reform the STRUCTURE of US politics. To establish mechanisms that expose and drive out liars, corrupt crooks, charlatans, and those who deliberately harm this country.
2) We need a REAL News Media , for one. Or at least a Guardian to oppose Fox News and to send the NY Times to its reward.
3) We need some way to have real debates, which force the candidates to defend their proposed changes.
4) We need to greatly reduce the role of Money — when a Presidential campaign costs $1 Billion , it doesn’t ultimately matter WHO gets elected — he will be in debt to at least several factions.
Any candidate should have enough public funding to at least ensure he has the financial freedom to tell people like Haim Saban to fuck off.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
First off, I agree with the general principle that you want the other side to run their best candidate because hey, they might win, and I’m not moving. So I never want to see Palin for President, even though it’d very likely mean a Democratic win that year and hurt the Republican Party long-term as well.
And as for the hypothetical spectre of Palin for President in ‘08… yikes! That would have been totally different than Goldwater ‘64 or Reagan ‘76. She had like a year’s experience as governor! She very obviously knows damn near nothing about world affairs! There’s a huge difference between being “unelectable” in the sense of holding unpopular positions, and being “unelectable” in the sense that you are manifestly just not up to the job in any respect. That second person is a whole lot more “unelectable.”
And Republicans aren’t going to vote for that second person in their primary, either. If Palin had actually had to run on a national level, Palinmania never happens. She would have gone the way of Tom Tancredo. Her support comes from the very fact that the Vice-Presidential pick is a fait accompli and a partisan has no choice but to rally behind it.
Now, four years is certainly more than enough time for Palin to fix her problem. It’s easy: Learn what the hell you’re talking about. But it doesn’t seem to me like she gives a shit enough to do it. I’m not sure whether she’s incredibly cynical about how dumb people are, or just very anti-intellectual. But either way, she seems committed to the “Who cares about that stuff? I’ll tell ‘em I’m regular folks just like them!” approach. That is not going to fly.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I want a sane republican party for the simple reason that it will make it clear that the lunatics are marginal and do not deserve a seat at the table with the grownups. I saw a car at the grocery store the other day with the following stickers “McCain/Palin” “Bomb Iran” and “the Media is the Enemy.” thus identifying the driver as a mainstream member of one of our two political parties. That just isn’t healthy. Someone like Palin, while she may not be particularly electable, would only make this element of our society stronger and more respected.
On the other hand, depending on how the financial crisis evolves, it may be very difficult for republicans in the near future to run on anything but populist resentment, war-mongering and social wedge issues.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I’ve been thinking along the lines of Chris (#33) recently. A moderate third party could emerge.
For the republican party to survive they have to deal with the right fringe, and, especially, right-wing talk radio. Right-wing talk radio creates an alternate reality that is consistently self-validating. To the talk-show guys, this election will prove that it is disaster to court moderate republicans. Its one thing to have friction within their party, but quite another when their only mouthpiece spouts hysterical rebellion. Its hard to see how the right-wing, radical talkers and the moderates can reconcile. Moderates will leave or be kicked out. There is no discernible moderate power base. And the right-wingers don’t care about victory as much as publicity.
The one way out of this is for the republicans is force-of-personality. I could see Romney becoming a galvanizing person. He is accepted by right-wingers, but has a soft-spoken, moderate appearance.
Main point: the split within the Republican party may make them a fringe party and elicit a third party movement.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Whether or not you buy his cycle argument, Matt still has a point. A gawdawful opposition campaign is great. A horribly no-intellect, all-style-no-substance opponent is not. Proof: GWB won 2X. We just came within 6% and a pretzel of Pres Palin. A raunchy sex scandal would have flipped that 6%.
Given the stakes, I’d rather have longer odds against a tolerable opponent. We’re not playing parcheesi here.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Maybe we have to stop accepting that the Republicans will be with us always. The Federalists are gone. The Whigs are gone. There will always be another party besides the Dems, but that doesn’t mean their particular party is immortal (nor are the Dems, of course, but they’re doing pretty good). If we press our advantage right and exploit the fissures, I think we could see the Republican party break down, eventually to be replaced by another alternative to the Dems, but not before a period of bloodletting that will keep them helpfully away from the levers of power. You may also start to see third parties emerge where they can emerge: in the Congress, not the White House. Third Parties typcially shoot for the White House as it is the easiest route to attention, but there are House districts they could actually win, and then caucus with one of the majors. I would expect the Libs and maybe some Christian Nativist party to start doing this. For the time being, I think the Greens are neutralized by the fact that nowadays the Dems look to be about as green as the public will welcome anyway. A splintering of the Repub coalition, though, would also create space for a splintering of the Dem one.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
My recollection is that a Bush diplomat was so incompetent that she signaled to Saddam that the US might look the other way if Saddam annexed Kuwait.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Simply because Bush called the Cheney Wolfowitz Perle “The Crazies” is not reason enough to declare Bush I’s foreign policy competent.
This reaching for bipartisan kudos is sheer poppycock.
November 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
“If instead of Bush [I] we’d gotten someone with more of a Newt Gingrich attitude, the whole situation could have been much, much worse. He could have, like his son, really trashed the country.”
Does Matt know something about W’s parentage that hasn’t disclosed up to now?
November 6th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Matt, you weren’t there in 1988. Those of who were remember it differently.
E.J. Dionne, Jr writing in the NYT, May 17, 1988:
Michael S. Dukakis is capitalizing on deep public doubts about Vice President Bush and the Reagan Administration’s handling of key issues and has emerged as the early favorite for the Presidential election in November, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Mr. Dukakis, the probable Democratic nominee, ran ahead of Mr. Bush, the almost certain Republican candidate, by 49 percent to 39 percent among 1,056 registered voters…
In the latest poll, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts led in all regions, but he ran especially well in the Northeast and Middle West. The poll found Mr. Dukakis with very substantial advantages over Mr. Bush among women, union members, Roman Catholics and blacks. Strikingly, 28 percent of those who said they voted for President Reagan in 1984 said they preferred Mr. Dukakis over Mr. Bush this time…
[H]alf of the country’s registered voters said they did not yet have an opinion of Mr. Dukakis, giving Republicans an opportunity to stir public doubt about his capacity to handle the Presidency…
Mr. Bush, the poll indicated, is suffering from the worst of two worlds: He is losing support because a majority of voters feel the Reagan Administration has performed poorly on problems that have become key election issues. At the same time, the Vice President is not even inheriting the popularity that Mr. Reagan does enjoy.
These were results on several emergent issues where voters think the Administration is doing badly, and doubt Mr. Bush would do much better:
* Only 32 percent of registered voters said the Reagan Administration has done a good job handling the budget deficit; 60 percent said it has not.
* On the problem of illegal drugs, 36 percent said the Administration was doing a good job; 55 percent said it was not.
* On dealing with the conflicts in Central America, 35 percent rated the Administration as having done well; 52 percent said it had not…
Moreover, when voters were asked which party would do best at handling whatever they identified as the nation’s most important problem – a question poll takers regard as a key leading indicator of voting decision – 40 percent said the Democrats and 29 percent said the Republicans. Democrats have never enjoyed such an advantage since the Times/CBS News Poll first asked the question in 1980, when indeed the Republicans had that big a margin before Mr. Reagan’s first victory…
[A]mong young people who are registered to vote, Mr. Dukakis leads Mr. Bush, 47 percent to 41 percent. One reason for this gap appeared to be that young people, despite their liking for Mr. Reagan, also like activist government, which is becoming increasingly popular with the electorate as a whole… Bigger government has not been this popular since November 1976, which is also the last time the Democrats won a Presidential election…
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEEDD1F3EF934A25756C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3
Dukakis turned out to be a god-awful candidate who threw away a sure thing.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I’d just like to point out what a really weird pair of sentences this is. For instance, who is ‘he’ in the second sentence?
November 6th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Shouldn’t progressives be hoping that a Republican leader emerges who is far more substantively qualified than Palin, but also far less charismatic, thus minimizing his/her chances of being elected while maximizing his/her chances of being an okay President if that were to happen?
I mean, yeah, Palin seems pretty unelectable, and it might be great for progressives if she were nominated and defeated in a landslide. But surely the Republicans have some other unelectable people who are also somewhat qualified to be President, for whom we could root with a clear conscience?
November 6th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
This whole argument sort of presumes that things in 2012 will look like they do now, but of course they may well not. Will republicans campaign on “warmongering?” Well maybe but that sort of depends how sucessful Obama is in his foreign policy agenda. Its also just much harder to campaign as the strong leader from the opposition. “Support our troops,” or “our troops can acheive victory if we allow them to” are powerful political slogans. “We want to invade x country” isn’t a good sell though. Now if an Obama administration can’t deal with a lot of the foreign policy problems it is going to face, either because they screw up or because things go badly for reasons outside their control, then the Republicans probably will argue that Obama is a weak leader and make that a centerpiece of their campaign. If Obama does well though and people feel safer about their world, then foreign policy issues won’t have the same kind of salience.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I’ve been thinking the next viable conservative party in the United States may not be the Republican Party ever since their primary debates, which amounted to a contest to see who could come across as the craziest person on stage. I give them three more elections at most (2012 and the mid-terms on either side) to show they have found a path back to respectability, and if not I think we may well see a major party split in 2016.
By the way, a little history: in 1980 Reagan’s coattails swept the Republicans into control of the Senate and helped them pick up a lot of House seats, but even then the Democrats retained a large lead in the House. Then in 1982 the Republicans lost back most of their new seats in the House while the Senate was basically a wash. In 1984, even while Mondale was getting beaten like a rented mule, although the Democrats lost some seats they still held the House, and they actually picked up seats in the Senate (not enough to retake it, however). Then came 1986, the first time Reagan;s first coattail class in the Senate was up for reelection, and the Democrats took back eight seats and the Senate, and again the Democrats regained some House seats.
My point in reviewing all this is that at no point during the Reagan years did the Democrats in Congress actually experience something comparable to the combined effects of 2006 and 2008 for the Republicans in Congress. In fact, the Democrats retained the House the entire time Reagan was in office and took back the Senate for his final two years. In short, they remained a viable national political party despite Reagan’s success at the presidential level. Again, what remains to be seen is whether the Republicans can do the same–and they are starting way behind.
November 7th, 2008 at 1:32 am
That’s true, DTM, but note that the Democratic party of the 1980s was a lot less ideologically unified than current parties; the Democrats really were quite weak in 1984 even if they still had a House majority.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:23 am
The goal is to destroy the Republican party for a generation, either by civil war, mass defection, or just loss of credibility in the eyes of the electorate.
For a chance at that I will take the much smaller chance of her becoming president. She would be unlikely to even win the Republican nomination – the goal is civil war between the rabid base and the pro-business elites.
November 7th, 2008 at 7:42 am
hope that you keep reporting and following up on this issue. I signed the petition because I can’t think of anything that is more important to the long-term health of our country, our environment, and our economy than a smart transportation policy, and especially
November 7th, 2008 at 10:34 am
AlanC9,
Absolutely–I didn’t mean to imply the Democratic Party wasn’t in a relatively weak state in the 1980s, and indeed it was arguably still working through the underlying issues as late as 2004. But that just emphasizes the point I was trying to make, which was that what has happened to the Republican Party over the last couple elections is worse than what happened to the Democratic Party even when it was in a relatively weak state.
And the reason I am pointing that out is that I sense some people still find it hard to believe that the Republican Party could actually sink so low that it would be replaced by a new conservative party. I suspect part of what they are recalling is the Democratic Party going through an extended period of weakness and now apparently recovering, and assuming the Republican Party is bound to do the same. So, I was just trying to point out that things are in fact a bit different so far. But we shall see.
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